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FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH centuries were decisive for all the people of God. It was a particularly crucial period for the Christian West, which had not only succeeded in catching up with the other cultures of the Oikumene but was about to overtake them.
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Karen Armstrong |
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Yet despite my depression and my fear for the future, I could not quite succumb to the prevailing despair. The worst had happened, but that meant that I no longer had anything much to lose, and increasingly I found that quite liberating.
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Karen Armstrong |
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There are many opinionated religious people who would do well to heed Paul's warnings to the "strong" who were intimidating the "weak" with their overbearing certainty. Above all, we need to take seriously Paul's insight that no virtue was valid unless it was imbued with a love that was not a luxurious emotion in the heart but must be expressed daily and practically in self-emptying concern for others." --
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Karen Armstrong |
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With this new empathetic understanding of the context, we will find that we can imagine ourselves, in similar circumstances, feeling the same.
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Karen Armstrong |
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Any interpretation of scripture that bred hatred or disdain for others was illegitimate,
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Karen Armstrong |
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so Enki tells Atrahasis to build a boat, instructing him about
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Karen Armstrong |
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A person who is impartial, fair, calm, gentle, serene, accepting, and openhearted is indeed a refuge.
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Karen Armstrong |
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Culture was felt to be a fragile achievement, which could always fall prey to the forces of disorder and disintegration.
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Karen Armstrong |
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What mattered was not what you believed but how you behaved. Religion was about doing things that changed you at a profound level.
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Karen Armstrong |
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Muslim fundamentalists have toppled governments and either assassinated or threatened the enemies of Islam with the death penalty. Similarly, Jewish fundamentalists have settled in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with the avowed intention of driving out the Arab inhabitants, using force if necessary. Thus they believe that they are paving a way for the advent of the Messiah, which is at hand. In all its forms, f..
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Karen Armstrong |
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bf9f8a9
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The Quran gave women rights of inheritance and divorce centuries before Western women were accorded such status. The Quran prescribes some degree of segregation and veiling for the Prophet's wives, but there is nothing in the Quran that requires the veiling of all women or their seclusion in a separate part of the house.
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Karen Armstrong |
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The Crusades were disgraceful but formative events in Western history; they were devastating for the Muslims of the Near East, but for the vast majority of Muslims in Iraq, Iran, Central Asia, Malaya, Afghanistan and India, they were remote border incidents. It was only in the twentieth century, when the West had become more powerful and threatening, that Muslim historians would become preoccupied by the medieval Crusades, looking back with..
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Karen Armstrong |
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Men and women have formulated this perception of sacred space in different ways over the centuries, but in their discussion of the special status of a city such as Jerusalem certain themes tend to recur, indicating that they speak to some fundamental human need.
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Karen Armstrong |
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Theism is so confused and the sentences in which 'God' appears so incoherent and so incapable of verifiability or falsifiability that to speak of belief or unbelief, faith or unfaith, is logically impossible." 2 Atheism is as unintelligible and meaningless as theism. There is nothing in the concept of "God" to deny or be skeptical about."
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Karen Armstrong |
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The Quran did not put forward any philosophical arguments for monotheism; its approach was practical, and, as such, it appealed to the pragmatic Arabs. The old religion, the Quran claimed, was simply not working.3
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Karen Armstrong |
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all rightly guided religion that submitted wholly to God, refused to worship man-made deities and preached that justice and equality came from the same divine source. Hence Muhammad never asked Jews or Christians to accept Islam, unless they particularly wished to do so, because they had received perfectly valid revelations of their own.
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Karen Armstrong |
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All religious people in any age have to make their traditions address the challenge of their particular modernity,
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Karen Armstrong |
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beliefs and doctrines are not as important in Islam as they are in Christianity. Like Judaism, Islam is a religion that requires people to live in a certain way, rather than to accept certain credal propositions. It stresses orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy.
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Karen Armstrong |
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One of the most characteristic new developments since the 1970s has been the rise of a type of religiosity that we usually call "fundamentalism" in most of the major world religions, including the three religions of God. A highly political spirituality, it is literal and intolerant in its vision. In the United States, which has always been prone to extremist and apocalyptic enthusiasm, Christian fundamentalism has attached itself to the New..
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Karen Armstrong |
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According to Luke, far from denouncing the cult, like Stephen, they worshipped together every day in the temple.22 Indeed, the revered Pharisee Gamaliel, whose views were more liberal than Paul's, is said to have advised the Sanhedrin to leave the Jesus movement alone: If it was of human origin, it would break up of its own accord like other recent protest groups.23 But for Paul, the Hellenistic followers of Jesus were insulting everything ..
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Karen Armstrong |
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But Enki wants to save Atrahasis,50 the 'exceedingly wise man' of the city of Shuruppak.
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Karen Armstrong |
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Deuteronomy had listed a number of obligatory laws, which had included the Ten Commandments. During and immediately after the exile, this had been elaborated into a complex legislation consisting of the 613 commandments (mitzvot) in the Pentateuch. These minute directives seem off-putting to an outsider and have been presented in a very negative light by New Testament polemic. Jews did not find them a crushing burden, as Christians tend to ..
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Karen Armstrong |
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When he described the dramatic arrival of the Christ, instead of drawing on the conventional imagery of Jewish apocalypse, he used terminology that was quite new to the Jesus movement, presenting Jesus's return as an official visit of an emperor or king to a provincial city. When the command is given, when the archangel's voice is heard, when God's trumpet sounds, then the Lord himself will descend from heaven; first the dead who belong to ..
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Karen Armstrong |
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Paul's opponents in Galatia believed that Jesus's heroic death and resurrection had inspired a spiritual renewal movement within Israel; they advocated continuity with the past. But Paul believed that with the cross something entirely new had come into the world.7 By raising Jesus, a criminal condemned by Roman law, God had taken the shocking step of embracing what the Torah deemed defiled. Jewish law decreed: "Cursed is everyone who is han..
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Karen Armstrong |
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This, of course, directly contradicts Paul's insistence that "in Christ" there should be full gender equality. So glaring is this discrepancy that many scholars believe that this passage was inserted into Paul's letter at a later date by those who wanted to make Paul conform more closely to Greco-Roman norms. Paul's letters were copied assiduously after his death and survived in 779 manuscripts dating from the third to the sixteenth century..
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Karen Armstrong |
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changed the course of history, but the process was not yet complete. It was only when Jesus returned at the Parousia that "we shall all be changed" and "death be swallowed up in victory."64 Then and only then would Christ establish the Kingdom, "deposing every sovereignty, authority, and power."65"
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Karen Armstrong |
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Shortly after he had dispatched his "letter of tears," Paul's fortunes plummeted to a new low. Claudius's last years had been clouded by court intrigues, and in October 54, he was poisoned by his wife and succeeded by Nero, his adopted seventeen-year-old son. The accession of the new emperor was hailed with relief and joy and an empire-wide resurgence of the imperial cult. But Rome was in trouble: The Parthians threatened the eastern fronti..
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Karen Armstrong |
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Perhaps the central paradox of the religious life is that it seeks transcendence, a dimension of existence that goes beyond our mundane lives, but that human beings can only experience this transcendent reality in earthly, physical phenomena.
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Karen Armstrong |
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Jesus had been born during the reign of the emperor Augustus (r. 31 BCE-14 CE), who had brought peace to a war-weary world by defeating rival Roman warlords and declaring himself sole ruler of the Roman Empire. The ensuing peace seemed little short of miraculous, and throughout his far-flung domains, Augustus was hailed as "son of God" and "savior." But the Pax Romana was enforced pitilessly by an army that was the most efficient killing ma..
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Karen Armstrong |
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In the West, we have deliberately excluded religion from political life and regard faith as an essentially private activity. But this is a modern development, dating only to the eighteenth century, and would have been incomprehensible to both Jesus and Paul.
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Karen Armstrong |
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Jesus's demonstration in the temple was not, as is often assumed, a plea for a more spiritual form of worship. As he rampaged through the money changers' stalls, he quoted the Hebrew prophets who had harsh words for those who were punctilious in their devotions but ignored the plight of the poor, the vulnerable, and the oppressed.
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Karen Armstrong |
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When these impoverished, indebted folk asked him what they should do, he told them to share what little they had with those who were even worse off--an ethic that would become central to Jesus's movement: "Whoever has two shirts must share with him who has none, and whoever has food must do the same."12"
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Karen Armstrong |
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The Kingdom of God has come upon you.'"30 The Kingdom became present whenever somebody had the compassion to admit a needy stranger to his home, when that stranger received food from another and then offered something in return. Peasants, Crossan explains, had two overriding anxieties: "Shall I eat today?" and "Shall I become ill and fall into debt?" In Jesus's system, if one person had food then everybody could eat, and there would always ..
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Karen Armstrong |
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All the great spiritual traditions have insisted that what holds us back from enlightenment is selfishness and egotism; they have also said that a practical concern for everybody (not simply those who belong to your own class or those you find congenial) was the test of true spirituality.
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Karen Armstrong |
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The Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel had lived only for God during his childhood in Hungary; his life had been shaped by the disciplines of the Talmud, and he had hoped one day to be initiated into the mysteries of Kabbalah. As a boy, he was taken to Auschwitz and later to Buchenwald. During his first night in the death camp, watching the black smoke coiling to the sky from the crematorium where the bodies of his mother and sister were to be ..
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Karen Armstrong |
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One of the first things I discovered was that Paul did not write all the letters attributed to him in the New Testament. Only seven of them are judged by scholars to be authentic: 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Philippians, Philemon, and Romans. The rest--Colossians, Ephesians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus, known as the Deutero-Pauline letters--were written in his name after his death, some as late as the se..
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Karen Armstrong |
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There are many opinionated religious people who would do well to heed Paul's warnings to the "strong" who were intimidating the "weak" with their overbearing certainty. Above all, we need to take seriously Paul's insight that no virtue was valid unless it was imbued with a love that was not a luxurious emotion in the heart but must be expressed daily and practically in self-emptying concern for others."
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Karen Armstrong |
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Many found the very idea hilarious. "Hi, Karen--how's God?" they would ask, as though inquiring about a mutual acquaintance."
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Karen Armstrong |
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Rida was one of the first Muslims to advocate the establishment of a fully modernized but fully Islamic state, based on the reformed Shariah. He wanted to establish a college where students could be introduced to the study of international law, sociology, world history, the scientific study of religion, and modern science, at the same time as they studied fiqh. This would ensure that Islamic jurisprudence would develop in a truly modern con..
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Karen Armstrong |
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There is a distinction between belief in a set of propositions and a faith which enables us to put our trust in them.
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Karen Armstrong |
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The French philosopher Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973) distinguished between a problem, "something met which bars my passage" and "is before me in its entirety," and a mystery, "something in which I find myself caught up, and whose essence is not before me in its entirety."69"
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Karen Armstrong |
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eminent monotheists in all three faiths--that instead of waiting for God to descend from on high, I should deliberately create a sense of him for myself.
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Karen Armstrong |
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In the official imperial theology, the titles "Son of God" and "Lord" usually applied to the emperor and the word "gospel" referred to his achievements. By speaking of Jesus in these terms, Paul was tacitly inviting the Roman community to declare its loyalty to the true ruler of the universe. Members were to become co-conspirators with him in acknowledging that, unbeknownst to the powers that be, a fundamental change had occurred when God h..
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Karen Armstrong |
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Had the notion of God not had this flexibility, it would not have survived to become one of the great human ideas.
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Karen Armstrong |